Alpine Faces

For nearly two decades, when time and money allowed, I’ve been traipsing off to the far-flung corners of the globe in search of the last living practitioners of a golden age of climbing. Whether their preferred arena was rock or snow or ice (sometimes all three), I sought to find, photograph, and perhaps share a tipple with those surviving ascensionists who were active between the 1920s and 1970s.

The climbers were chosen partly out of necessity. When I began, I was looking for the oldest ones I could find. There were essentially no climbers still alive who had been active before the 1920s, so that was my default starting point. As for ending in the ’70s, that was a more slippery slope. By the 1970s, climbing was becoming more common and indeed a lot safer, due to improvements in the gear and an increased likelihood of rescue if a climb went awry. And by the ’80s, the glamour was gone; the remarkable had become